Twitter experiments with muting feature on its mobile app

The ability to mute an account on Twitter has been standard in apps like Tweetdeck and Tweetbot for a while. Now it looks like the ability to hide tweets from an account without actually unfollowing said account is coming to the official Twitter app. Or at least it’s being tested. Twitter is once again experimenting with features via its official app. The mute function hides an account’s tweets from your feed, but still lets direct messages and notifications through. 

One of the most-requested features for Twitter’s mobile apps may be on the cusp of arriving. Users of the company’s iOS and Android clients are now seeing an option to mute accounts that they follow, preventing another user’s tweets and retweets from appearing in their timeline. The user remains muted until you manually unmute them. In essence, then, the mute feature works as a kind of stealth unfollow — you won’t be seeing another person’s tweets, but they won’t know that. Muting is said to be among the most popular features in Tweetdeck, the business-class Twitter client that the company acquired in 2011. And there are good reasons why.